Users frequently use search engines for locating information of interest either from the Internet or any database system. Search engines commonly operate by receiving a search query from a user and returning search results to the user. Search results are usually ordered based on the relevance of each returned search result to the search query. Therefore, the quality of the search query may be significantly important for the quality of search results. However, search queries from users, in most cases, may be written incomplete or partial (e.g., the search query may not include enough words to generate a focused set of relevant results and instead generates a large number of irrelevant results), and sometimes misspelled (e.g., Bill Smith may be incorrectly spelled as “Bill Smitth”).
One common approach to improve the quality of the search results is to enhance the search query. One way to enhance the search query may be by generating possible suggestions based on the user's input. For this, some approaches propose methods for identifying candidate query refinements for a given query from past queries submitted by one or more users. However, these approaches are based on query logs that sometimes may lead the user to results that may not be of interest. There are other approaches using different techniques that may not be accurate enough. Thus, there still exists a need for methods that improve or enhance search queries from users to get more accurate results and also present users with useful related entities of interest as they type the search query.